Faultlines

There’s a crack in the ice now, come all at once and splitting the mirrored surface like a frozen fault line. I am frustrated. I’ve been enjoying the reflections of the stormy sky, admiring them for hours and hours as they waltzed with one another. They flirted constantly, flashing all their blues and their greens; colours you wouldn’t notice if you did not pay them enough attention, merely glancing as others would. They were exhibitionists and confident in their beauty, rewarding you if you admired them for long enough, if you were willing to look gormless as you stared. They were rewarding me most of all, producing flakes of snow like tears of gratitude.

I had snow on my lashes and in my hair, strewn around my face and parted at the back from where my head had been making friction against my headrest. I ignored it. I felt nothing of the cold it appeared to threaten. I commanded this place and the elements respected me enough to make me comfortable. Behind the hazy sky, the light was fading. Good, I thought. Daytime was unnatural here, lit up just too bright. It was too artificial, as though the trees were adorned with the tented spotlights of a cameraman’s studio. It was too white, as though the very snow was glowing. But, at the same time every evening, the light began to fade and the world would be as it should be. Then, the lights would go out. I assume then I am sleeping, though the sounds of the woods and the very subtle movements of the water in the pond still reach me in unconsciousness. It’s a strangeness of the place that I do not understand. Sleep, like everything else, is different here.

Most different is how very comfortable I am. I have no recollection of how I came to be here, but wherever I was before had never felt so serene. It is so far from the heat and the noise I remember, though I do not know where from. There are no shouts or rumbles in this quiet, nothing drilling holes into my head and shredding skin and skin from my wrists and hands. There is no sticky itching fever when I lay so still upon this snowy bank. That is the most relief: the cold I can and cannot feel.

It's incredible, really, how little the cold is bothering me considering how long I've been sat here. I’m utterly motionless, frozen not by the falling temperature but by my own sense of peace. Why would I want to move? Where, other than here surrounded by the smell of pine and the stillness of winter, would I want to be? And I refuse to acknowledge those who tell me I'm not here at all. What would they know?

They aren’t seeing what my eyes are seeing. They are not in this world I am in. Not really.

They come and they go, the ones who question me and doubt me. The ones who feel like an unwanted and disorientating dream, making my surroundings move so abnormally. And I find myself increasingly irritated by the blue women forcing pills I do not need in my hand and water I do not want down my throat. The women in green who hang tubes from the softest skin in my elbow. I am approached by the clicking of heels on laminate and the rattling of a cart with four wheels. Those noises should not be here. I am in my forest and staring at my pond. They tell me I am not here at all but I am. They tell me that my pond is of my own creation but it’s not. Just look upon it. Watch it as I do. As if I could make something this beautiful.

And they say that the things I am taking will bring the sun out again. I don’t want it, I don’t. When I am forced to swallow and pushed onto my back, my lake flickers. The icy surface is flooded and cracks grow larger from the very middle. They’re fault-lines that threaten my world, my section of the surface. They would break apart, pull away from one another like separate personalities, and drop me into the space between them.

And if the sun were to come out, the ice would thaw completely.

Besides, promises of good weather may draw people to my spot. Real people. Not the blues and greens who make this place flicker and fray at its seams. I mean actual people who make noise and ruin the tranquility of my pond. They come in and they converse with each other so quickly I can only cling on to a handful of words. They suggest unspeakable things for me to do to myself and almost succeed in making me do them. They tell me to try to swim in my pool, despite the ice and the freezing temperatures. They know I will drown if I try. They know I will lose myself, kicking and punching the skin across the top of the water when I cannot find my exit and I am running out of air. They think it funny. They try to convince me that my life will be easier in whatever place I go to after my lungs fill with water. Sometimes, I begin to believe them.

But then, someone forces pills I do not need in my hand and water I do not want down my throat. The seams bend and stretch. The trunks of the trees flicker like the flame of a candle. The people vanish and I am treated, once more, to silence.

I do not want the sun to come out. The women in blue and green have told me that when it does, the tubes hanging from the crook in my elbow will be taken out. They can’t take them out. Those tubes are tying me down here. If they’re removed how will I stay here so still for so long? I will have to leave. I don’t want to leave.

I do not want to leave. Each time I open my eyes here, there are pine trees bowing under the weight of snow and each time they snap, their aroma is fresh and clean. And every moment I am awake I can cheer on the slits in the skin of the pond, knitting themselves back together after trauma and injury, healing and sealing off that water I find so tempting when I am told to. It's such a reassuring thing, like the wound in repair is one of my own. The tissue is scarring nicely and the stitches are almost dissolved. I’ll be alright again in no time.

I don’t know. Perhaps they’ll make me leave, the women in blue and green with their clipboard and their questions and their pills and tubes. Perhaps, one day, the forest around me will flicker so violently that the trees come crashing down and the pine needles come loose to pierce my skin and scratch my eyes. Perhaps the branches will perforate the water’s icy surface and cleave the cracks fatally wide. Perhaps they will coax me out with promises of other beautiful places. REAL beautiful places, they say, as though this one is not. Perhaps they will tear the beauty from my pond like hair from my untidy scalp. They will force me to find somewhere else to settle, where the sky is bright and blue and the water is teeming with life. Can’t they understand I do not want that? Life is loud. The fish will talk me into joining them for a swim and the reeds will tangle around my ankles to hold me under since there will be no ice to trap me instead.

I hope they don’t. I wish to stay here, silent and still and untroubled by the people who love the sun; the holes being drilled into my head; the sticky itching fever which breeds upon my skin. And maybe the women of green and blue will bother me less, put less pills in my hand and less tubes in my arm, as they realise they cannot draw me from this place when I do not wish to leave. Perhaps I will spend years, decades, admiring my pond which is real (though they tell me it is not). Perhaps, as I reach an age too old to admire my pond any longer, I will give in to my temptations and finally find out what it would be like to die in something so beautiful.